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Improved technology is creating an obligation for healthcare providers to recover patient data soon after a disaster, says Gary L. Kaplan, JD, an attorney with the law firm of Thorp Reed & Armstrong in Pittsburgh.
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Compliance and regulatory officers have until Aug. 1 to comment on a proposed rule that includes a new accounting of disclosures provision that gives individuals the right to receive a report on who has electronically accessed their protected health information (PHI).
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued an interim final rule to adopt the first two in a series of "operating rules" that will standardize the HIPAA standards for electronic administrative/financial transactions.
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When an EF-5 tornado, among the biggest ever recorded, hit St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, the damage was so severe that all the patients had to be evacuated and taken to other hospitals outside the community. Their medical records were accessible, however, and the hospital was providing care again within a week, all because the hospital had adopted electronic health records (EHRs) only weeks before the disaster.
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Crico Strategies, the medical malpractice company owned by and serving the Harvard medical community in Cambridge, MA, recommends these remedies for the common causes of obstetrics (OB) claims:
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A 34-year-old nursing student complaining of headaches presented at a local university hospital. Diagnostic testing showed a small aneurysm. During a procedure intended to repair the aneurysm, the woman's brain was pierced.
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Cloud computing can be a lifesaver for healthcare providers recovering from a disaster, says Bassam Tabbara, PhD, chief technology officer and co-founder of Symform, a data storage provider based in Seattle.
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The experience at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, after the tornado is an excellent example of how electronic health records (EHRs) can improve disaster response if the system is structured correctly, says Elliot Davis, internet security officer and director of information technology at Beaumont Health System in Grosse Pointe, MI. The key is to have the data accessible from a distant location, as St. John's did, or on "the cloud," in which data is stored on another company's servers or spread through the Internet, Davis says.
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The report on obstetrics claim from Crico Strategies reinforces some of the facts that make risk managers worry about their OB units.
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The news from the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is not good: No matter how much healthcare providers and regulatory bodies stress the need to avoid wrong-site surgery, this sentinel event still occurs about 40 times a week.
